Micromegas

The cosmos is vast beyond comprehension, and yet somehow humanity has convinced itself it matters. This is the delicious premise of Voltaire's 1752 satire: a being from Sirius, twelve miles tall, journeys across the universe with his companion from Saturn (a mere six thousand feet). When they finally reach Earth in 1737, they must construct microscopes to perceive these supposedly intelligent creatures teeming on a small blue dot. What follows is a masterpiece of deflation. The travelers observe humans, our philosophical debates and scientific Certainty, with an outsider's amusement that reveals how absurd our sense of cosmic significance truly is. Voltaire, writing decades before Shelley or Wells, invented the science fiction conceit of cosmic perspective to serve his favorite target: human vanity. The satire cuts both ways, because the giants are also small, and the microscopes that reveal humanity also diminish what they reveal. It is philosophy disguised as a fairy tale, and it remains startlingly funny nearly three centuries later.